Ian Davidoff, a student I’m working with on a project, just came across a 2004 report from the ACT government on school reporting. Its firm recommendation (#16) is to tell parents nothing about how their schools are performing. The report then shows a scatterplot of test score gains for various schools (shown to the left).

In other words, students in some schools drop 50 index points on reading between grade 3 and grade 5, while students in other schools gain 50 index points. But gosh, we couldn’t have parents knowing which one their child is at, could we? Reminds me of Joh Bjelke-Petersen on the benefits of abolishing the media: "then we could live in peace and tranquillity and no one would know anything".